Assaulting the American Mind

No one seriously interested in higher education can afford to read The Closing of the American Mind. Or so the late Dwight Macdonald might have put it. He practically did. Substitute “international relations” for “higher education” and you have the beginning of a review Macdonald wrote in the early 1940s. His target was a great book—if not yet a Great Book—entitled How to Win the War and the Peace, tossed off by Mortimer J. Adler.

In his squib,...